4 POWERFUL Ways to Boost Your Mitochondria

In this episode today, what we want to talk about are the basic tenets of mitochondrial health and regeneration. And I want to go through 4 primary areas that we should be thinking about and doing. We're trying to get the mitochondria to work again and then add the other things on top. Hey, I'm Dr. A. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I've been researching and teaching in the integrative and naturopathic medical world for 30 years now. And during that time, I've been seeing patients mostly in the chronic illness and cancer worlds. I use this channel to answer questions that we get. So let's get into it. First area that we want to think about is going to be the diet because the mitochondria not only runs based on nutrients that come in and, and go in through the oxidative phosphorylation chain, make ATP, all that stuff, but also that whole chain that passes the electrons down to create ATP, which is an energy unit, is made of nutrient substances as well. So the diet is crucial to feeding the mitochondria for their formation and their operation. So when you are thinking about dietary substrates, dietary things that are gonna help, everybody eats differently. And one of the benefits of the internet, although you gotta be a little bit careful looking stuff up, is you can go and you can look at what you eat and you can look at, I want to find a high this nutrient in foods. And you plug that in and look for the foods and see if you eat them Or not. So if you're looking for more B vitamins, you're looking for minerals, things like that, you can just look that up and find out if that's in your diet. But the things that you want to think about that would be most useful would be a combination of foods that give you a good amount of the B complex of vitamins. So those are normally considered, if you look at a B vitamin supplement, to be things like vitamin B1, 2, and 3, vitamin B5, vitamin B6, and then vitamin B12. And then there's folic acid and biotin, sort of non-B numbers but B-like vitamins. And you want to look for all of those things in foods. The next category you want to look for are going to be minerals and trace minerals. They're all minerals, but minerals— your kind of macrominerals would be calcium, magnesium, potassium. You're looking for those. Easy to look those up and find. But also you want trace minerals. That would include things like selenium and chromium and zinc and all of that sort of stuff. And again, those are going to be in different types of food. So wherever you eat on the spectrum, just look up within the foods you eat where you're going to be getting those things. Then the next thing would be fats, and these would be fats that are used to help in the formation of the membranes of the mitochondria in the cells, et cetera. So these would be your phospholipids, things like phosphatidylcholine, and you can look up You know, foods that have phosphatidylcholine and choline proper. And then when you're thinking about, okay, I'm going to work on my diet, but I might want to supplement, the supplementing things that would be most helpful on the dietary support, we're going to talk about specific ones later, but the dietary support would be a good multivitamin that has some trace minerals and the B vitamins and everything in it. And maybe if you find that the foods you're eating don't have a lot of phospholipids, a little bit of phospholipid supplement. In the olden days, we would give people lecithin. That's a a phospholipid supplement. You also get phospholipid supplements in pills, but something just to augment the diet. Number 2, moving your body, also known as exercise. Now, a lot of people, especially people who are fatigued, will say, well, I have fatigue, I don't want to move my body. And it's kind of a catch-22 because you have this need to keep your skeletal muscle, the stuff that holds us up and moves us around, moving. And we know that when we move the muscles in the body, we send signals out that are pro-healing. But the other thing is that Movement of the muscles maintains the mitochondrial turnover. And when we make new cells, we have to make new mitochondria. Part of that is supported and stimulated by regular movement of your body. So if you're already in good shape and you're exercising, great, you're there. If you're, you know, not terribly fatigued and you just need to kind of get out and do more exercise, you can start to make a goal to do that. Being former athlete, what I have to do now in, you know, my older age is I just set it up in calendar so that I have scheduled times because I do a lot of work behind desks, see patients, do all the stuff. I'm not usually running around or lifting weights while I'm doing that. So I have to put it in my schedule so I make sure I hit it. And then pretty soon it's just habit like anything else. But what if you're really sick? We've had people, it's right after surgery, or they just got done with chemotherapy, or they have really fatiguing illness like chronic fatigue, fibro. What we do is we still focus on this, but you have to go in baby steps when you're sick. What does that mean? That means that where You might have to do the entry-level exercise for 4 to 8 weeks and then do another baby step up. It can be a bit frustrating, but it's called graded exercise tolerance because you're trying to go from maybe no activity or post-surgical activity to just a little bit more. And then you get used to this. I could train into that. And then the next baby step might only take, you know, 6 weeks if the last one took 8, and then the next one might take 4 weeks. But you don't want to go from no exercise to tons of exercise and hurt yourself. You want to just keep your body moving. What are the most important muscles to move? Those are your big core muscles, things that hold us up. The legs and then the arms are going to be your 2 biggest friends for this. Quick interruption from the regular video. If you are a healthcare practitioner and you have an interest in this topic, we're going to put a link in the description below to my CE website and specifically the webinar that is about this topic. We'll see you over there. Thanks. Number 3, sleep and stress management. Oh boy. You know, we have an epidemic of stress that is not well dealt with. We have an epidemic of basically sleep deprivation among people. And so it's one of those things where you don't solve the problem usually, you keep working at it. It's kind of like movement and exercise. So one of the things that you can do in regard to sleep are sleep hygiene measures. Now I'm not going to go through them all, but these would be things like having a digital sunset, shutting screens off at a certain time, all of that stuff. So if you look up sleep hygiene, just like dental hygiene, only sleep hygiene, look that up. You're going to find tons of articles and Tips on how to engender better sleep. So you know it's going to involve when you eat, when you're looking at screens, and all sorts of stuff. So optimizing sleep as you can. Now you can also do things like get a biometric device. So you could get one of the rings that tell you about your sleep, or one of the wristwatch kind of things that tell you about your sleep. They do give you good feedback, and you can see if you're sleeping you know better or worse, etc. And with stress management, one of the things that's kind of nice here is that point one and two feed into stress. Now they don't take all your stress away, but having a good, well-balanced diet that works for you and moving your body actually are ways to help mitigate some of the negative effects of stress. But the bottom line is we all have stress or we'd be dead. Basically, life is a stressor, but we also now have stressors, you know, that are socially and societally kind of different than they were 100 years ago. So we have a constant availability through our devices, not only to us personally from people from the outside, but we also have our devices And we can have availability of constant stressful information like the news and like all sorts of other stuff. So we have to manage that. You know, very few people can just go be a hermit, but we have to manage the way that we interact with the world, the way the world interacts with us to the degree we can. So on the base of better diet and better movement and exercise, we want to look at ways to manage the stress that's coming at us and also to realize that some of the more healthy responses to stress, because it's really your response to stress that's more important than the level of stress are how we deal with that. And that can be helped by things such as mindfulness or meditation or whatever you want to call it. But that can be very, very useful. There's a lot of strategies you can do. Now, if you have a ton of things going on and you have, you know, a bunch of sick family and there's all sorts of stuff and you feel overwhelmed, obviously you need to get some outside help. It's another thing that you can do. But in the long run, it's what you do with yourself that's going to help. And then number 4 would be Things that might go on top of what we've talked about in 1 through 3 as far as supplementation. Now, supplementing your regular diet, I talked about a good multivitamin mineral. We talked about maybe phospholipid supplements if you're not getting enough of that in your diet. But specific supplements, and this sometimes will confuse patients, if I have somebody under a lot of stress and their mitochondria are really, you know, kind of behind the curve, I may have 'em on a multivitamin, multimineral, and a B complex both. And they'll say, well, there's B vitamins in my Multivitamin that I'm taking. That's true, but the levels in most multivitamins are quite low because they got to put it all in you know one two three pills, right? So a B complex on top of the multivitamin is often very good. The next thing would be sometimes we do the same thing with trace minerals. So your multivitamin mineral might have calcium and magnesium, maybe some potassium, and then maybe a little tiny bit of zinc or some selenium, but it may not have a bunch of trace minerals. So we'll give the B complex, the multi. Multivitamin mineral, and sometimes a multi-trace mineral too to get those trace elements in there. Now things that might help specifically with function from a nutrient point of view at the level of the mitochondria: coenzyme Q10 and alpha lipoic acid. We've done stuff on those before. Those are specific; they help everywhere in your body, but they have specific effects in the mitochondria. And then we've done a bunch of content on NAD, which is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. It's a nicotinamide is a form of B three. There's nicotinic acid and nicotinamide. Nicotinamide is in the pathway of making NAD. So some people on the, you know, more cost-effective end of things will supplement nicotinamide, and then some people will supplement things that will jack up the NAD faster, like nicotinamide riboside. That's kind of up to you. All right, I hope that clears up some of the questions that we triggered with our other mitochondrial discussions that we've had. I'm Dr. A. This is my YouTube channel. I answer questions here. Thank you so much to all the subscribers. The community is growing really, really well. It's growing fast. We really appreciate all you guys. Please remember to subscribe if you haven't. Do notification bell and then like, share, do all the stuff. We totally appreciate it. Thank you a lot, and I'll see you on the next video.